Sentry: Understanding How Software Fails
Software breaks in production. When it breaks, it’s important to have all the information about how and why it broke available. Collecting this data is often a simple task, but it’s important to choose the right tool to get the most out of your data. Simple log files The simplest way to track the behavior […]
Games of Ping-pong are Played All Over the World of Work
That’s it, you’ve finished the big creative project you’ve been working on for weeks. All you have to do is pass it along for feedback, before getting it out into the world. After one week you get no response, so you send an email checking on status. Of course, your collaborator is quite busy and […]
Software is the Competitive Advantage
In 2003, the Harvard Business Review published an article IT Doesn’t Matter. The argument was that since IT resources are becoming cheap and available to companies of all sizes, IT cannot be a competitive advantage. Nicholas Carr presented his case: By now, the core functions of IT—data storage, data processing, and data transport—have become available […]
Starting Software Projects with the End in Mind
There’s a lot of excitement in a new project. The code flies from the fingertips and it isn’t too long before a developer can look back in amazement at how much has been written. In these early stages of development, it is important to understand how software will be deployed into a production environment. When […]